Welcome to My Blogatory!

Rapid Game Prototyping

Experiments from the Blogatory

This week I’ve decided to try something a little different. So far, I’ve written career posts and whined a bit about my PCs and that has been great fun, but when I created Adventures in Play, I wanted to create a segment that focused on fun stuff that I like to do in my spare time. The problem for me, is that like many, I don’t have a lot of spare time and lately I have been exercising a lot of down-time watching the Olympics and Netflix (I discovered Farscape this week) shows. Mind you, watching the Olympics has been a lot of fun and to be honest, I am going to miss watching those athletes do their thing. It inspires me to be superfocused on my goals. Speaking of being super-focused, have you heard of rapid game development? Back in 2005 I read the now classic article “How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days” (still a terrific treatment on the subject). I’ve always meant to run my own game prototyping sprint to hone my game development skills, but I’ve never really had the time or frankly, discipline to commit to a crazy development schedule. Some of the recent articles I’ve read on rapid prototyping have gone to greater extremes, writing a game in one weekend or 30 games in 30 days. I guess it’s a matter of preference, but I do have a day job and would like to spend time with my family. So, my revised plan is to focus on the fun and return to the original goal of one prototype in 7 days. My focus for this experiment is to have fun while writing a simple game for the Mac. Really, what do I have to do in February besides get my taxes done early and wait for winter to end?

Experiment #1: Creating a game in 7 days

My Rapid Game Prototype Commitment:

Write a simple, yet complete game in one week.

Create a game for the Mac using the SpriteKit framework.

Have fun!!! Although I am genuinely interested in becoming a better game developer, my motivation for this experiment is pure whimsical fun.

My kiddos (Thing 1 and Thing 2) will judge my game at the end of the week giving my game a fun-factor score.

Make my game available to the public for general enjoyment!

I plan to give daily updates on my progress, so check back here tomorrow or follow me on Twitter (@runstop) to see how I am doing.